I have seen this in the past as well. The problem for us was not related to Jboss at that time. It occurred on a Linux Box, running the 2.4 Kernel. Our work around was: 1) Become root 2) Execute ulimit -n 8192 This may also be any other large number. The total number of open file handles is very large for even normal machines. 3) su username (Where this is the user that runs your jboss instance, and start the server). While I don't think this really fixed the problem; it allowed us to continue. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4039663#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...